You got your RSS feed set up (woohoo!).
But when you test it, there’s a line at the bottom that says “The post appeared first on” It shows in your MailChimp emails, MailerLite, in feed readers.
And it’s annoying. Mostly because you can’t where it’s coming from.
So where did the text come from? The Yoast SEO plugin adds it by default, but the good news is that it’s really easy to get rid of (or change it to something that is written in your own voice).
First, why does it add that text?
Here is Yoast’s explanation:
This feature is used to automatically add content to your RSS, more specifically, it’s meant to add links back to your blog and your blog posts, so dumb scrapers will automatically add these links too, helping search engines identify you as the original source of the content.
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The more popular your blog gets, the more likely it becomes that you will eventually have someone trying to steal your content word-for-word and paste it onto their own blogs–without giving you credit or linking back to your blog. The dirty thieves actually use your RSS feed to automatically steal and copy your content.
Having the exact same blog post on two different blogs could be confusing to Google. Google wants to send traffic to the original source and not a thief’s site, but without credit and links to the original site, they might not know which one is the original. This is why Yoast adds the line “The post appeared first on” and links it back to the specific blog post, and your blog homepage. It automatically tells Google that the post belongs to you, and Google will send their traffic to you.
So it is worth weighing the risks before deleting the text altogether.
Here’s how to get rid of the text
Time needed: 5 minutes
How to get rid of “The post appeared first on” from the bottom of your emails and RSS feeds.
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard
- On the left side, towards the bottom, hover over “SEO” and click on “Search Appearance”
- Click on the tab up top that says RSS.
In the second box down, you’ll see the text:
The post %%POSTLINK%% appeared first on %%BLOGLINK%%.
Delete that text.
- Click “Save Changes”
You’re all set! Your emails will no longer say “The post appeared first on” at the bottom.
Here’s how to change the text
The other option, if you want to keep the links back to your blog is to change the text so it sounds more like your voice, maybe something more fun.
For that, just change the text around %%POSTLINK%% and %%BLOGLINK%% (you don’t want to remove those, because those are the actual links back to your post and homepage. For example, the posts on this blog say:
Christina’s post %%POSTLINK%% was written for %%BLOGLINK%%. Which would translate to:
Christina’s post How to get rid of “The post appeared first on” was written for Meyne.
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